Excomulgado · In collaboration with
Universidad
Autónoma
Chapingo
Propagating the agaves that are disappearing.
Securing the future of Mexico's rarest distillates.
For every bottle sold, one euro goes directly to a laboratory keeping rare agave alive.
The Universidad Autónoma Chapingo operates a specialised laboratory in Zimatlán, Oaxaca, dedicated to propagating agave varieties that are at risk of disappearing. These are the species at the heart of some of Mexico's rarest agave spirits — varieties that take 20 or 25 years to mature, that grow in specific microclimates, that cannot simply be replanted like a crop.
For every bottle of Excomulgado sold, one euro is donated to this laboratory. An additional ten cents per bottle goes directly to graduating Chapingo students to fund their own independent projects — whatever they are building, agave-related or not. We also support students in smaller practical ways, like funding driving lessons for those who have never had the opportunity.
In return, Chapingo offers expertise: help with plague control, organic and biodynamic transitions, field management, and any agricultural challenge the maestros face. We also collaborate on events — bringing the Excomulgado community into direct contact with the science and the scientists behind the work.
We are open to more. Any sustainability project that emerges from the industry — any idea worth backing — we want to know about it.
"€1 per bottle.
Every bottle.
Every sale."
to Chapingo lab
to students' own projects
We replant. Not just agave — trees.
Every maestro we work with replants agave after each harvest. This is not a policy we impose — it is a practice the maestros understand in their bones. These families have been working this land for generations. They know better than anyone that an exhausted hillside produces nothing.
But we go beyond agave. The palenques we work with also replant native trees — because reforestation means more than filling the gaps left by the agave harvest. It means maintaining the ecosystems that allow wild agave to thrive: the shade, the moisture, the relationship between the forest and the pollinators that carry agave seeds across the mountains.
"Not just agave.
Trees. Soil.
The whole
ecosystem."
Some agaves are planted
not to be harvested —
but to survive.
Agave takes between seven and twenty-five years to reach maturity. The species in our portfolio that are hardest to find — Tepeztate, Tobalá, Sierra Negra — are not endangered by over-harvesting alone. They are endangered by the slow erosion of wild populations that would otherwise self-propagate across the mountains.
Through our work with Chapingo, the maestros stay in direct communication with the laboratory. When a maestro notices that a particular variety is becoming scarce on the hillside, that information reaches Chapingo, who can begin propagating it in controlled conditions.
Some of those propagated plants are never destined to become a bottle of agave spirit. They are planted to reproduce — to attract the bats and hummingbirds that carry pollen and seed across the mountains, to build back populations depleted over decades. The harvest will come later, or not at all.
Espadín, Coyote
Tobalá, Barril, Cuishe
Tepeztate, Sierra Negra